Trendy fashion sites are nothing new, but what might be is the trend in online purchases from those cool fashionable websites.

This fashion website called ‘Nasty Girl‘ has gone from $28 million in revenue from last year, 2011 to a cool $128 million on track for this year 2012. This kind of growth is quickly attracting investments from venture capitalists. They just secured $40 million in Series B funding and they plan to grow steadily as Forbes has called them out at a staggering 10,000%. Nasty girl isn’t the only one cleaning up in VC fund raising, other niche’ fashion websites are doing well. Just Fab raised $76 million in funding.

I’ve noticed an uptick in niche’ fashion websites and their marketing strategies towards their target demographics. They are using edgier tactics along with exclusive offerings through their email marketing blasts which aren’t present visually from their public facing website. I have been using Jackthreads for quite sometime and I am always impressed with their ability to entice my to click through ads in their email blast to their website.

WordPress or other PHP CMS based website hacked?

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the level of security you have tried to impose for your website. Coming up with crazy long passwords that no one or machine would guess. Sometimes it is beyond your control. I host several sites on Dreamhost, and their servers were hacked. The hackers were able to gain access to the database server. On January 20th Dreamhost admitted there had been a breach, but they weren’t divulging specifics. Link to TechCrunch Story.

So what happens if you have been a victime of such a hack? Well, if you ‘re like me, you had sites that were redirecting to other websites when visitors would request your page or URL. Not cool. Totally sucks right…amIright? Ok, so you’ve been hacked…now what? Well, depending on what kind of hack you have it could be a simple resolution or a complete pain in the ass to resolve. This post is focused on what I have done to fix hacks related to websites redirecting due to injected “base64 encrypted” code. To resolve it we need to take a look at the files in your website.

WD TV Live Demo & Unboxing

So Santa brought me a new HD TV this year that was destined to be used in the bedroom. Very exciting time indeed as up until this point watching t.v. has been a bit of an issue with the existing projection HD television that is on the floor. Kinked necks and not being able to see the bottom of the screen fueled the request to the jolly man in the red suit for a new t.v. that could be mounted on the wall. Well, that’s exactly what I did. I hung a 40 inch LCD on a full motion tilt mount that makes watching shows and movies a more enjoyable experience.

Doing a clean install of OSX Lion on my MacBook Pro!

So Lion has now been out since late July of this year and I have been slow to jump on board. My reluctancy has mostly come from being busy Mon – Fri at work and not wanting to lose productivity, and then not wanting to even open my laptop on the weekend. It’s always a process to reinstall / upgrade an operating system in any environment.

I’ve been trying to ease this burden more and more over the years by using applications such as dropbox, google apps, evernote and other syncing and cloud services. It does get easier but there is also the plethora of software suites and licensing fun and all that junk.

How to put WordPress into “Maintenance Mode”

One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that it comes with the built-in ability to put itself into “Maintenance Mode”. This can come in super handy while you’re developing, switching, upgrading, or troubleshooting your WordPress site. It will give you (or any user with the ability to sign into the admin area of WordPress) the ability to sign into WordPress and see your site as you normally would while your visitors / users see a completely separate splash page or even a completely different site. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll just stick to a splash page.

Below are the steps to put WordPress into, and easily get it out of, “Maintenance Mode”. For this tutorial, you’ll need to make sure that you can see / edit hidden files (files that begin with a “.”) in your file system or FTP client.

I moved my wordpress posts from an old site to my personal blog.

So after a lot of thought, I decided to ditch the “Scattered Blogger” website I created about a year ago. The idea was to create a more focused blog about blogging techniques, tutorials on WordPress, plugin reviews and just about anything on the topic of blogging. Well, I started off strong about 20 posts, and things were moving along fine, and then life happened. I am sort of making an excuse but the bottom line is, I just became overwhelmed with updating multiple properties.

So I decided to move over the posts I created on Scattered Blogger to my personal blog here. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any of my links and SERP rankings to the key to success is the proper use of a “301 Redirect” from the old blog to this one. This is a quick blog post with a video demonstration on how I managed to do this.

So what’s the deal with Netflix?

So when Netflix decided to a streaming only service and the “DVD” portion would switch over to “Qwikster” I thought to myself, “ok, who cares”? Apparently there was a lot of “caring” going on to the point where Netflix has decided to can the whole idea. They also changed their pricing sheme and according to the email I received from Netflix just moments ago, they do not plan to change the pricing plans again. We will see about that. Below is a screenshot of the email they sent to me.

Staying secure & semi-anonymous on the web

Simply put, a vpn (virtual private network) can be incredibly beneficial for multiple reasons. Most corporations require access to their networks via a vpn for security and allowing flexible access to much needed resources within their networks. VPN services are becoming much more popular however for the general web surfer not connecting to corporate networks. I have been on a quest to find a solid service provider, and here is my 30 day review of ivpn.net.

Doing it right.

One of the first things I loved about ivpn.net was that they “claim” not to keep logs. That is really important to me because that is kind of the whole point of using a vpn as a regular web user. To remain as “anonymous” as possible. Why? So I can do illegal activities? No, just because it’s not anyone’s business. I pay a fee to my ISP every month for access, but I know that they log and sell that information and provide it to marketers, federal agencies, and other agencies such as the RIAA and MPAA.

Google Plus has finally come to the iPhone!

Ok, it sounds a bit precocious to say “finally” simply because the social network that was launched by Google is still in beta, and it’s only been a few weeks. In web launch terms though that’s more like 6 months. I was a bit peeved when I knew there was an Android app out for Google Plus but not an iPhone app? Well, how could I be all that shocked, really? After-all, it was “Google’s” social network and they take care of their own first before tending to the herds on the other side of the digital fence. Ok, I can accept that. So finally though they released the iPhone application and this is my first impression after using it for two days.

First off, when it was released it was hard to locate. I actually ended up tracking it down on the web and then emailed it to myself where I launched it from my email on my phone. That seemed to work just fine. If you are looking for it yourself you can click download google plus for iphone or click on the logo above. So at first glance, the application is pretty simple, and clean. I like that and appreciate the simplicity. Let’s take a look at the home screen: